nd the mysterious web of family life
receives the hue of a new and darker thread.

What a sad bereavement is the death of the husband and father! Children!
there is the grave of your father! You have recently heard the clods of the
valley groan upon his coffin. The parent stem from which, you grew and to
which, you fondly clung, has been shattered by the lightning-stroke of
death, and its terrible shock is now felt in every fiber of the wrenched
and torn branches. Yours is now a widowed and an orphaned home. The
disconsolate members are left helpless and hopeless in the world; the
widowed mother sits by the dying embers of her lonely cottage, overwhelmed
with grief, and poor in everything but her children and her God. These
orphans are turned out upon the cold charities of an unfriendly world,
neglected and forlorn, having no one to care for them but a poor,
broken-hearted mother, whose deathless faith points them to the bright
spirit-world to which their sainted father has gone, where parting grief
shall weep no more.

But a greater bereavement even than this, is, the death of a wife and
mother. Ah! here is a bereavement which the child alone can fully feel.
When the mother is laid upon the cold bier, and sleeps among the dead, the
center of home-love and attraction is gone. What children are more desolate
and more to be pitied than the motherless ones? She, who fed them from her
gentle breast and sung sweet lullaby to soothe them into sleep,--she, who
taught them to kneel in prayer at her side, and ministered to all their
little wants, and sympathized with them in all their little troubles,--she
has now been torn from them, leaving them a smitten flock indeed, and the
light of her smile will never again be round their beds and paths. As the
shades of night close in upon that smitten home, and the chime of the bell
tells the hour in which the mother used to gather them around her for
prayer, and sing them to their rosy rest, with what a stricken heart does
the bereaved husband seek to perform this office of love in her stead; and
as he gathers them for the first time around him, how fully does he feel
that none can take a mother's place!

"My sheltering arms can clasp you all,
My poor deserted throng;
Cling as you used to cling to her
Who sings the angel's song.
Begin, sweet ones, the accustomed strain,
Come, warble loud and clear;
Alas, alas! you're weeping all,
You're sobbing in my ear;